Data communications over telegraph circuits 1892

W.U. did an enormous amount of R&D on fax, none of which ever earned them much and none of which has any applicability to fax as it is used today. The Desk-Fax worked like ordinary fax of the period, scanning the blank optically and recording by applying a voltage to the Teledeltos paper. The signal was chopped to make it into a tone and was transmitted over a voice-grade (with DC conductivity) local loop between the customer office and the telegraph office. At the telegraph office they used concentrators, so that the customer might have to wait for a connection to an idle recorder as there were only enough recorders to handle the expected traffic volume. Then the messages were usually keyboarded into Baudot and sent the rest of the way through the public message switching system and delivered as telegrams. They had some visions of perhaps transmitting end-to-end by fax and may have done it now and then, but I don't believe they ever developed a long-distance service using fax. They certainly didn't envision a customer's fax machine being connected to another customer's machine at a distance and transmitting the message in one hop. Among their more goofy ideas was a coin-operated fax transmitter to be installed where the public could use it.

They seem to have hired a bunch of engineers back in the 1920s, and then not hired any people during the 1930s depression, and then after WW II they started hiring engineers again. So there is this enormous age gap in their engineering forces. But they had good people, and the old guys were able to get up to speed on the newer technologies.

You may be able to find old encyclopedias that have some traffic statistics in the articles - which were often written by Oslin. No doubt there are good statistics in FCC documents, but finding them in the archives would be quite a task, I expect. It was always an article of faith with Western Union people that AT&T had violated an agreement to stay out of the telegraph business when it offered TWX service. Presumably the agreement was not strong enough to stand up in court or W.U. could have sued over it. Clear into the Fifties W.U. was attempting to get the government to declare that there should be one voice carrier (Bell System) and one record carrier (W.U.) - from a technological standpoint this is completely ridiculous since voice grade circuits could also carry data.

A book complementary to Oslin's is "The Telegraph" by Lewis Coe (McFarland & Co.) I don't know Coe's background, but he seems to tell the story more from a Postal Telgraph point of view. As I mentioned in another venue, it appears that government policy was to keep W.U. with exactly one foot in the grave at all times. When the government forced AT&T to divest its share of W.U. it was perhaps good anbreastrust policy but it lost the nation its best chance to have a coherent development of all forms of wire communication, voice and record. Then there were the unfavorable terms when W.U. acquired Postal, Then W.U. was required to divest its cable business. The company wasn't help by its succession of lackluster leadership following Newcomb Carlton. Their next good president seems to have been Walter Marshall, who came out of Postal. --

jhhaynes at earthlink dot net